The point of my post is that its vital for businesses not to take a top down, one-size fits all approach when they (or their agency) are analysing site traffic and conversions.

We’ve recently started working with translation services business The Translation People to help them improve their online conversion rate. As with almost all businesses who have analytics installed, although there was no advanced traffic segmentation in place (apart from the standard paid/non-paid traffic sources and a few other) in order to get a realistic view of which visitors they should be looking to convert.

Cutting to the chase, as I describe in my Econsultancy post, by creating and applying an advanced segment which identified which visitors are likely to be good prospects, we were able to see that only 10% of all traffic where good prospects for thie business.

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors – using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance – its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving – using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance